In our last piece, we introduced 3 different types of account farmers and how each of them can be detected.

Now, we want to give you a chance to put yourself in our shoes and see how a conversation with an account farmer could look like.

Just 5 questions and a few minutes. Join the conversation, read between the lines as a true investigator, and see if you can spot the correct farmer type.

Let’s play!

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Threat Intelligence

Can You Spot the Account Farmer?

For months, we have interacted with numerous account farmers.

Now you get a chance to do the same.

Ask the right questions, read between the lines, and guess which type of account farmer you’re dealing with.

Start the game

The account farmer archetypes

There are three operators we kept running into, and the game drops you in front of one of them at random.

The Hustler is impersonal and industrial. He advertises in the open, reuses the same setup across every account, and hands you a whole cluster to catch.

The Soloist is one person doing everything by hand, fast and friendly, and he leaks at the handover.

The Franchise Farmer is a business, with a catalog, a support desk, and very few signals (if any) per account.

We wrote up all three in detail, with the real cases behind them, in our previous article on account farming typologies.

How to read a farmer

Every question you can ask maps to a real signal we look for. Ask how they take payments, and a Hustler wants crypto up front while a Franchise Farmer routes you through escrow. Ask how they keep an account unbanned, and a beginner shrugs while a professional hands you a full behavioral playbook.

Under each answer there is an intel button. That is where we tell you what piece of actionable intelligence the answer just gave away.

We built the questions around the same criteria we assess in the field: the assets, the operational security, and the sales motion.

In that sense, the game does not just show you the account farmer archetypes and lets you interact with them. It teaches you how to read between the lines of a criminal’s responses.

What’s next

As we conclude the typology analysis, the next frontier of detection signals comes from understanding how exactly account farmers are onboarding their accounts and getting them verified.

There are numerous tools that are used in different stages of the account lifecycle, and being able to detect a specific software tool used to cover account farmers’ tracks could go a long way to shining a light on them.

So next time, we will focus on the "KYC bypass" toolkit itself.

In the meantime, use the form to the left to subscribe to our "Threat Radar" newsletter.